Where Moth and Rust Destroy
Where Moth and Rust Destroy
In this story, we learn how Heat creates Time. We also explore the ways that Entropy disorganizes heat in the universe while Life reorganizes it in the never ending war for calories. ⚔️🔥
TLDR—I’ll summarize this story for you.
As we start to zoom back out from quantum mechanics, it’s easy to see that the reality you and I share is only a very small part of the universe. Dark matter could be the “dark plumbing” of how our universe works, but there’s still a lot we can learn from the observable 5%. Within the baryonic universe, Energy is governed by the Laws of Thermodynamics.
@ChatGPT: What are the laws of thermodynamics?
ChatGPT: The laws of thermodynamics are fundamental principles that govern the behavior of energy and its transformations in physical systems. There are four laws of thermodynamics:
1. Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics: If two systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third system, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other. This law establishes the concept of temperature and forms the basis for temperature measurement and thermal equilibrium.
2. First Law of Thermodynamics: Energy is conserved in a closed system. The change in the internal energy of a system is equal to the heat added to the system minus the work done by the system. It states the principle of energy conservation.
3. Second Law of Thermodynamics: Natural processes tend to increase the overall entropy of a system and its surroundings. It establishes the direction of processes, the concept of irreversibility, and the limitations on heat engines' efficiency.
4. Third Law of Thermodynamics: As the temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a pure crystalline substance approaches zero. It provides insight into the behavior of systems at extremely low temperatures.
So in short:
Temperature is a measurement of heat
Energy cannot be created or destroyed
Entropy naturally increases over time
No heat = no entropy.
Entropy Versus Life
The most important lesson we can learn from Thermodynamics is that there are two opposing forces in our universe: Entropy and Life. Entropy slowly disorganizes the heat in our universe while Life slowly reorganizes it.
Here’s how Wiki describes entropy,
Entropy is a scientific concept, as well as a measurable physical property, that is most commonly associated with a state of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty. The term and the concept are used in diverse fields, from classical thermodynamics, where it was first recognized, to the microscopic description of nature in statistical physics, and to the principles of information theory. It has found far-ranging applications in chemistry and physics, in biological systems and their relation to life, in cosmology, economics, sociology, weather science, climate change, and information systems including the transmission of information in telecommunication.
Here’s a great explanation of entropy from Veritasium on YouTube. It’s appropriately titled, “The Most Misunderstood Concept in Physics”. (27 mins)
Entropy is basically the process of heat spreading out. For example, whenever energy is transferred between objects in the observable universe, friction acts like a little heat tax in the equation. Entropy naturally increases over time which means decay is fundamental to the information in our universe. Entropy is the reason our DNA gets corrupted and forms cancer. Entropy is the reason that mountains and beaches are eroding. Entropy is yet another reason that humanity could not have evolved over millions of years. Our genes are actually disintegrating, not integrating.
@christians: The original sin in the Garden of Eden was not trusting God, right? The serpent caused Eve to doubt God’s promise that eating from the forbidden tree would cause her to die, right? So a physicist’s way to think about the phrase “the wages of sin is death” is “the wages of doubt is entropy”.
Entropy and heat transfer are probably more important than you realize. For example, when a hot pan is taken off the stove and placed onto a countertop, it immediately begins to cool, right? The heat from the pan gets transferred into the countertop and all the air around it. But, getting all that “unorganized heat” from air and the countertop “organized again” to go back into the pan is impossible. So entropy is what creates the irreversibility of time.
In “Reality Is Not What It Seems”, Carlo Rovelli explains this idea. He writes,
At the precise moment when heat is produced, the process is irreversible: the past differs from the future. It is always heat and only heat that distinguishes the past from the future…. Whenever you consider a phenomenon certifying the passage of time, it is through the production of heat that it does so. There is no preferred direction of time without heat. But heat is our way to name averages over many variables. The idea of thermal time reverses this observation. That is to say, instead of inquiring how time produces dissipation in heat, it asks how heat produces time.
Rovelli continues,
Hence time is not a fundamental constituent of the world, but it appears because the world is immense, and we are small systems within the world, interacting only with macroscopic variables that average among innumerable small, microscopic variables. We, in our everyday lives, never see a single elementary particle, or a single quantum of space. We see stones, mountains, the faces of our friends—and each of these things we see is formed by myriads of elementary components. We are always correlated with averages. Averages behave like averages: they disperse heat and, intrinsically, generate time. … Time is an effect of our overlooking the physical microstates of things. Time is information we don’t have. Time is our ignorance.
@musicfans: If the universe is rendering an individual reality for each person, then time should be very difficult to synchronize, right?
Nothing makes this more painfully obvious than music. The reason bands have to be in the same room together for practice is because time is so difficult to synchronize that people have to synchronize in space first. Ever try to practice over zoom?
The reason live music is so mesmerizing is the synchronicity. The next time you are watching live music, and the band is slaying your favorite song, notice how synchronized they are. Look at all the bodies moving together in the audience. Notice how synchronized they are with the beat of the drummer. “Keeping time” is so important in music because nothing synchronizes the Matrix like music. I hope that trips you out at your next show.
The War For Calories
Heat is measured in calories. The calorie was originally defined as how much energy is required to heat 1 gram of water by 1 degree C. It has since been defined in terms of the Joule because of the Mechanical Equivalent of Heat. The Calories in our food are actually kilocalories, so big ‘C’ Calories are actually 1000 times more energy than the calories of the universe. Technically, when you drink a milkshake, those 800 Calories are actually 800,000 calories of the universe. 🥤
#stillworthit
While entropy is slowly dispersing the heat in our universe, life is slowly collecting it. Every living thing on Earth is at war for calories of heat. Let’s use plants as a simple example. If you touch a plant in your backyard, it probably doesn’t feel that warm. That’s because all of our senses are relative, just like time and space and truth. 🤔
Let’s say the temperature of a plant is 50 degrees F, which is 10 C. When we compare the plant’s temperature to the absolute temperature of the universe, however, it is 283 C above absolute zero. The plant is hotter compared to outer space than boiling water is compared to ice. Much hotter actually. But the plant can’t create that much heat on its own, it needs help getting that warm. The reason the plant is so warm is because the Sun emits 90,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 calories of energy every single second. Some of that energy hits the Earth, which traps the heat in its atmosphere. So the temperature of the air and the ground around the plant is already warm.
Some of the Sun’s energy is also absorbed by the leaves on the plant which use photosynthesis to turn carbon dioxide into glucose and oxygen. The glucose molecule is the simplest sugar and has about 4 kilocalories of energy per gram. The plant uses this energy to create the starches in its body. It also uses this energy to wage war against the neighboring plants (in super slow motion) for better access to the Sun and underground nutrients. 🤺
Here is Sir David Attenborough to demonstrate how plants battle each other. (3 mins)
Plants not only fight each other, they fight back against insects and other animals too. Here is a video from bioGraphic Magazine to demonstrate. (8 mins)
During a plant’s lifetime, it will synthesize light, air, water, and nutrients to become its biggest and best self. And before that plant dies, it will package up its best genes and transfer them into seeds or nuts that will grow up near a protective parent.
@botanists: Aspen trees clone their DNA and connect at the roots to share nutrients and resources. So just imagine how many molecules of the universe are reorganized by the DNA algorithm in an aspen tree grove.
Let’s use an animal as another example of a DNA algorithm that organizes the calories of the universe. A gazelle “organizes” the stored energy from the millions of grass blades it eats. Subsequently, the gazelle is now a walking goldmine of calories. All those potential calories are why gazelles are constantly stalked by lions. The lions allow the gazelles to do all the busy work of eating fresh grass and then they eat whichever gazelle is easiest to catch. 🦁
The amount of calories required by apex predators to stay alive is astonishing, and that includes people. Humans disintegrate from programmed cell death so rapidly that 98% of all the atoms in our bodies are less than 12 months old. Every body of everybody you know is only one year old. The reason old people are old is because their DNA software has been replicating for decades and the entropy of this universe is slowly destroying its informational integrity. Our software ages, our hardware does not. Aging is actually an “informational disease” that will be cured in my children’s lifetime. If you want to learn more, check out:
@christians: In Revelation 9, the Bible says that people in the future “will seek death and will not find it; they will long to die, but death will flee from them”.
If you think I’m being melodramatic about humans disintegrating without food, you’re wrong. Just watch the television show “Alone”. On the show, people are forced to live like cavemen in the remote wilderness with only ten primitive items each. Watching this show is as close as an anthropologist can get to traveling back in time. Week by week, every contestant on this show looks like they are “evaporating”. If people don’t eat for two months, they basically hollow out from the inside. When a player surrenders to injury, starvation, or psychological breakdown they are out and the last person surviving alone is the winner.
Tap the photo below to watch Alone Season 7. It’s fantastic. All of these men and women are courageous and inspirational. You will learn more about what it means to be human from this show than whatever else you are watching on TV. Watching Roland stab a muskox to death with a 4-inch knife is about as caveman as it gets. 🔪
To keep from wasting away, the average American eats 964,560 Calories every single year to maintain their temperature. Each year we consume:
220 pounds (100kg) of dead animals
146 pounds (66kg) of milk
40 pounds (18 kg) of oil/butter
40 pounds (18 kg) of cheese
90 pounds (40 kg) of fruit
170 pounds (77 kg) of vegetables
This is why there are more chickens on Earth right now than people. The DNA of the Cornish Cross chicken is crushing it because people love fried chicken, including me. The atoms in my body are at least 3% Chick-fil-A by molecular weight. I live in Austin, which means I’m also about 30% queso and tacos. We eat tacos for breakfast, tacos for lunch, and tacos for dinner. 🌮
Eventually, by the time I’m 50, I will be completely made out of salad. 🥗
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